In a painfully honest interview, a regretful Suzi Quatro reveals the woman behind the public persona

About midway through my interview with Suzi Quatro who, at 63 — and no, in case you’re wondering, she’s not wearing a leather catsuit, but is clad in denim — leans forward conspiratorially and whispers:

‘I need to tell you something . . .’

Could this be it? Is the queen of glam rock about to reveal a story of such hell-raising shock value she has never dared share it with anyone else? A night of passion with Alice Cooper, perhaps? Or a 24-hour drink and drugs binge with Paul McCartney?

No, she isn’t. Instead she closes her eyes and hums. It appears that Suzi, a self- confessed psychic, is right at this very minute receiving a message from my dead grandmother who passed away eight years ago.

Your grandmother wants you to stop being so angry about everything and try to understand that this stage in your life is a learning curve, a clue you must unravel to become a better person,’ Suzi announces, eyes squeezed dramatically shut.

The outburst finishes as abruptly as it started, leaving an awkward silence that Suzi instantly fills with a bawdy laugh. ‘That’s not even me speaking,’ she declares. ‘Those aren’t the words I would use.’

I don’t know whether to be more shocked at the suggestion that Suzi believes she can communicate with the dead or that my grandmother — whose interests included Vermouth and knitting — appears to have chosen a formerly mullet-haired, leather-clad Seventies rock chick to impart wisdom from the other side.

Suzi with first husband Len and daughter Laura
Still, the revelations from Suzi don’t stop there. Her divorce, teenage pregnancy, abortion, mother-daughter conflicts and all-consuming guilt are all on the table.

She is talking to me to promote her one- woman show that will be running for six nights in September at a small venue in London’s Hackney.

The event is 90 minutes of Suzi standing alone on a stage and, using a mix of songs, video clips and a script she has written herself, exposing — she says for the first time — the woman behind her public persona.

Some will call it brave, cynics will no doubt see it as a desperate attempt to keep her brand alive and kicking.

It’s something at which Suzi has become adept over the years, having successfully reinvented herself several times — most notably as an actress and Radio 2 DJ — since her Seventies heyday.

There’s no doubt her show will reveal a surprisingly strong, nagging sense of guilt that underpins much of her life so far. Suzi attributes this to her Roman Catholic upbringing.

She was born in Detroit in 1950, the fourth of five children, to an Italian father, Art, and Hungarian mother, Helen. From a young age, she was encouraged to play piano, bass, guitar and percussion.

She and her sister Patti formed a band, The Pleasure Seekers, in their early teens and achieved such strong local success that Suzi decided not to go back to school.

The decision was supported by her father. The band soon had a record deal that saw Suzi — at the impressionable age of 14 — leaving home for a life on the road.

Looking back, it is clear that while she doesn’t regret this decision it did, nonetheless, have a lasting emotional effect.

Her eyes fill with tears as she tells me of her first big affair — which happened during this time — with a married A&R man from Mercury Records (whom she will only call DC).

The first time they slept together was on her 18th birthday and her resulting pregnancy ended with an abortion that still haunts her.

‘I would have loved to have had that baby,’ she says with an almost unbearable sorrow. ‘Not a year goes by when I don’t think about it — what that child would be like, how old they would be.

‘When I get to those Pearly Gates — hopefully — this is the sin I will pay for. I am so sorry for it, but sometimes you just don’t have a choice and I was absolutely petrified. Years later it still comes back to haunt me and I don’t think I will ever get over it.

‘But looking back, I missed a huge chunk of normal teenage development. By leaving home and touring at such a young age my childhood was cut short.

‘I’m not saying this as any kind of excuse, but there are gaps missing and perhaps this caused me to make decisions I might not have done otherwise.’
It may go some way to explaining why, as a young and clearly troubled young girl, she claims she started ‘hearing’ dead people.

‘Ever since I was a child I’ve just had this sense that I’m connected to the spiritual world. I thought everyone else felt the same way. I can hear voices — not all the time — but when I’m with certain people it sometimes comes through.

‘I can feel things — tap into emotions. When I meet a new person I know their life straight away. I suppose you could call it a special intuition, but it’s my number one quality and I’m always 99.9 per cent right. If I don’t like someone it always turns out to be for a good reason.’
At 21, Suzi moved to Britain to pursue her solo career, leaving her family behind. She went on to marry her guitarist, Len Tuckey, with whom she has two children — Laura, 30, and Richard, 28.

But despite the fact her daughter finally appeared to have settled down, Suzi’s mother remained brokenhearted that she had fled so far from the nest. Only 20 years later, as her mother was dying from stomach cancer, did Suzi discover why she was so worried.

‘She told me she’d always, secretly, known about the abortion,’ says Suzi. ‘She also admitted to me that her biggest regret was letting me leave home at such a young age.

‘She told me: “You were just a baby — on the road with all those temptations.” ’

As well as being the year she lost her mother, 1991 also marked the end of Suzi’s stormy 16-year marriage to Tuckey. Again, her guilt over the divorce is tangible and, all this time later, it feels ‘like a kick in the stomach’ when she recalls how the relationship broke down.

‘I never wanted it to end,’ she says. ‘There comes a crossroads in every marriage where you grow together or grow apart. I outgrew Len. He wanted me to be in that leather jumpsuit for the rest of my life and do nothing else. He constrained me. It got to a point where the marriage died or I did.

‘It was a horrible decision and one I spent six years agonising over.

‘I’ll never forget the day we told the children — who were then nine and seven — that we were getting divorced. I don’t care what anyone says, but all children prefer their parents to be together.

We TOOK them upstairs to the bedroom and broke the news. They cried. The memory of it still brings goose pimples to my arms.’

As well as coping with the after-effects of the divorce, Suzi concedes that it probably wasn’t the easiest upbringing for her daughter — growing up in the shadow of the woman responsible for getting every teenage boy in Britain through puberty.

‘I tried to give them as natural a childhood as possible,’ she says. ‘They went to normal schools, and Len and I juggled our concert commitments so one of us was always home with them.

‘But the mother-daughter relationship is a complex one. And, despite everything, history still managed to repeat itself with Laura.

‘For she insisted on leaving school, and then home, at 16 and nothing I suggested could stop her. She ended up getting a job in a pub. It wasn’t what I wanted, but sometimes you have to let go because otherwise you’ll suffocate your children.

‘And it was hard for Laura. She was resentful having to share me with the public and somehow she had to find her own space in all of that. We used to have terrible rows.’

Today, Suzi reveals that Laura plans to become a social worker (‘She’ll be good at that, having lived with me half her life’), and is a single mother to Suzi’s granddaughter, Amy, who is 12.

Suzi’s son, Richard, is training to be a fireman and lives five minutes away. She still lives in the moated Elizabethan manor house in Essex that she bought with Len in 1980, after spotting it on the cover of Country Life.

Despite living in Britain for more than 40 years, her accent remains steadfastly American. She’s also been happily married to second husband, German concert promoter Rainer Hass, for 20 years.

The secret of their marital success, she happily admits, has much to do with the fact they live apart.

‘Rainer spends most of his time in Hamburg and I spend most of mine in Essex and touring,’ she says.

‘We have our neutral ground — a flat in Majorca — which is an eclectic mix of our two tastes.
‘It was a nightmare when we decorated because Rainer’s house is modern and mine is very old. We were this hilarious couple in the shop arguing over what pots to buy.’

It will come as a huge disappointment, I’m sure, to all those men of a certain age who still see Suzi as a leather-clad sex kitten, to visualise her buying pans and squabbling over the colour of Le Creuset casserole dishes. Yet, in a strange kind of way it seems to be what Suzi wants.

Granted, she’s not quite ready to step out of that leather jumpsuit or, indeed, cease wiggling that still impressive bottom.

But as the 50th anniversary of her musical career approaches, it’s clear she’s doing some serious soul-searching and is keen to take her fans along on the journey with her.

‘I still stand in the wings before each performance and have this little voice in my head repeating the same thing over and over again,’ she says. ‘It’s saying: “I hope they like me, I hope they like me …” ’

Could this really be the insecure inner voice of the world’s female pioneer of rock music? Or, dare I suggest it, a dead person with the worst sense of timing in the world?